At The End Of Life

*

The red shirts whistle and wave outside the Siam Paragon Centre, this high end shopping complex with Hermes and Gucci and Maserati cars. There wasn't any time to be peaceful or free. He could feel the world shrinking into one disheveled mess. Some days he just woke up off the air. With dumb, cow like expressions on their face, commuters remain glued to the video advertising in the densely packed carriages. Blood is everywhere, red blood, protestor's blood, the courage of conviction, to believe sincerely in everything. They should be machine gunned, blood is a health hazard, a loud American said in the crowded internet cafe come travel agent. What a stupid thing to say, he said loudly, but of course the American did not hear. They never hear anything but themselves. The fabric of things is all wrong. He was out on a limb and could not get back.

Waves of distress kept overtaking him. He couldn't feel or believe anything, not now. All he wanted to do was medicate the distress away. And yet it would pass. Would it? There wasn't time to be frightened. He couldn't see what the solution was. Some days he was just off the air, that was all there was to it. The cruelty of fate, the fundamental disturbances in the ether, the endless prattle of the loud and self obsessed; the garbage about God and Higher Powers and outside in the thick, sweaty heat the protestors kept coming and coming. There were extra police on the sky train stations. The crowds sat clamped together. Almost no one read. Almost no one acknowledged the existence of another. The red shirts could be a million miles away. They poured blood over the gates of various institutions; and it was hard to believe that here, in this strange futuristic city, he was not in the thick of it all.

Time passed; cruel time, kind time, and the grinning auspices of another face, the front line officers of another consciousness; and through it all, oh bless me, bless me, went the voice, they could hear nothing but contempt for those "out there", as the crowds slowly returned to the high end stalls and significantly, desperately, anguish written large, eyes popping out of his head, the air conditioning cool and bright young things in their frilly dresses swishing through the mall, through the acres of malls, while outside the heat stifled and the red shirts shouted, crammed into the back of crowded vans, sweating, their own skin flailing, giving off the aroma of death, of sacrifice, of crowded sweat and ultimate belief. They appeared entirely cheerful. There had been little violence. The government was not backing down. There would be no elections. Not now. Not for a long time.

There had to come a time when he could learn to live with himself, when the waves of distress would dissipate, when he didn't want to drape himself in the street with every protestor, with every misguided belief, with every ardent advocate of the real world. It would come easily. How terrible to be so frail, so misguided, so desperate for a drink, for oblivion, for the simple caress of an altered consciousness. Enjoy your shopping experience. If you notice any belongings not attended please contact your staff. While enjoying your shopping experience please keep your belongings with you at all time. Thank you for your cooperation. If only he could simply rewrite his head. Be called to answer. Summon up courage. Overcome disgrace. Begin anew. And outside in the heat the whistling and the banging continued; and supporters waved from the sides of the street, from the overhanging bridges, from the balconies of this oh so crowded city.

He was indifferent to his own fate. He made time pass and relished it all. It was time to settle down anew, to begin anew, to find peace in quiet houses, to discontinue the search for comfort; because it would never come. There was no way out but through. There was no way to answer the questions that haunted not just him but everyone around him; the meaning, the purpose, the way to escape the anguish. To become God, a fragment of the broader spirit. To trudge the road of happy destiny. But that wasn't going to be. He could only summon small pieces of the past. Plastic teeth. The rigours of growing old. He reached out to be kind; to old Bill, 60 years sobriety, to make amends, as if the entire past was a ghost town; while he looked down on marauding packs of young girls parading through the high end malls of Asia, the glistening floors, this ultra modern world where sky scraper piled on sky scraper and the advertising bill boards rose like waves into the sky.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v5/newsworld.php?id=483084

Red Shirts Achieve Target; UDD Protesters Pour Blood At PM's Home

BANGKOK, March 17 (Bernama) -- Thailand's Red Shirt protesters broke through cordons of police on Wednesday to splatter their own blood on the front gate at the entrance of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's home, and flung bags of blood over the walls into the compound in an upscale area of the capital.

However, during the incident, the prime minister is out of the city on the job upcountry, Thai News Agency reports Wednesday.

A caravan of pickup trucks, cars and motorcycles carrying thousands of red-clad protesters led by the red-shirted United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) began moving from Phan Fah Bridge, their main protest venue in the old Bangkok area adjacent to the centres of government and the bureaucracy, to the prime ministers' residence in Soi Sukhumvit 31, paralysing outbound traffic.

Thai News Agency reported that some 1,500 policemen with shields and batons were in formation in front of the premier's residence to provide security, which was raised to the highest level.

But the protesters braved rain and penetrated the police barricade, achieving their goal of pouring their own blood on the front gate and nearby walls of the prime minister's home.

Despite the significant scuffle and push, there was no report of violence.

The blood-pouring campaign at the prime minister's house followed similar actions on Tuesday at entrances of Government House and Democrat Party headquarters as protesters' intensified their campaign to pressure Mr Abhisit to dissolve Parliament.

It was the latest move of the Red Shirt four-day rally which drew some 100,000 protesters on Sunday on Rajdamnoen Avenue, many loyal to convicted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra who was ousted in the 2006 coup.

However, the number of protesters has dwindled to about 25,000 people, according to the Peacekeeping Operations Command.

The Thai government earlier enforced the Internal Security Act, deploying 50,000 soldiers and police across the capital and surrounding provinces as it feared possible violence.

http://ricksweblog.ebidz.biz/archives/310

A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC

Feb 27th, 2010 by Rick Arms

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all – the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

n other words, in crucial respects the IPCC’s 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world’s politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December’s Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by “Climategate”, the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC’s 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU’s suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.